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 This is the current iteration of my compute farm. No, it's not mining butts; it's doing science. Since 2017 I've been building (and building, and re-building) machines and letting them do work for a variety of research projects -- mostly World Community Grid. WCG is very heavy on biomedical research, but also has projects like the Africa Rainfall Project which aims to improve weather forecasting in sub-Saharan Africa -- and area that has very little attention from the world's major weather agencies, but where more accurate forecasts would be very important for improving food supply. These six machines have 84 cores/168 threads between them. That's roughly one CPU-year of compute every two days, but the farm has only been in this configuration for about two months. Back in 2017, it was just one machine, running part-time; now it's these six, with 100% of their time devoted to doing work for university research teams. My total CPU time devoted to WCG is currently just over 236 years and two days. If you're interested in more details, you can find them here. This hardware project has spawned two software projects, Homefarm and Gnatwren. Homefarm is a bundle of Ansible scripts and bash/python tooling to deploy, maintain, manage, and introspect a Linux fleet running BOINC (the unfortunately-named (it was the 90s!) software that underlies projects like WGC, enabling grid computing). Gnatwren is in early, heavy development and is still climbing out of its testbed phase, but it will be a very lightweight metrics and monitoring system. I've worked in tech my entire adult life, and have found very few ways to use my skills and knowledge to directly make the world a better place. This feels like one way that I can do that -- plus I get to fiddle with hardware and write a bunch of management systems, which is a plus for me because that's the kind of nerd I am. If you're interested in any of this, or have any questions, I'm happy to chat over in the BOINC/grid computing thread Edit: Thengor is the most amazing thing mdxi fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Mar 17, 2021 |
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Mar 17, 2021 18:06
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Keetron posted:So do you have that hooked up to your houses' heating system? I live in a 1BR apartment that's less than 700sqft. These sit in the living area, so yes, they do contribute significantly to the ambient air temperature. It's not as bad as you might be imagining though, because I set CPU package power limits and use the ridiculously-large-but-excellent NH-C14S cooler on them all. These machines run at ~3.5GHz all-core, with temps between 63 and 65C, 24/7, year-round. Basically, they're clocked to the point where they don't overwhelm the lovely window unit AC in summer.
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Mar 17, 2021 22:10
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